Expanding Your Search

You can expand your search by using the OR operator. To retrieve pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase OR between terms.

Refining Your Search

Since Search returns only web pages that contain all of the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. The refined query returns a subset of the pages that were returned by your original broad query. If that does not get the results that you want, you can try to exclude words, search for exact phrases, or restrict the search to a range of numbers. These techniques are described in the following subsections.

Word Exclusion

If your search term has more than one meaning, you can focus your search by adding a minus sign ("-") in front of words related to the meaning you want to avoid. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign. You can daisy chain a list of words you want to exclude.

Phrase Searches

Phrase searches are useful when you are searching for famous sayings or specific names. You can search for an exact phrase or name in the following ways:

• By enclosing the phrase in quotation marks. Search will return only documents that includes the exact phrase you entered.
• By using phrase connectors—such as hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes—in between every word of your search query.

Phrase connectors and quotation marks join your search words as a single unit. For example, if you type the following query, Search treats it as a phrase search even though the search words are not enclosed in quotation marks.

Advanced Search Operators

Search supports several advanced operators, which are query words that restrict your search to a smaller set of documents. When you enter your search query, do not add a space between the search operator and the search terms. You may want to try focusing your search with the following operators:

• allinanchor: Restricts the search to pages that contain all the search terms in the anchor text of the page. An anchor is a marker inserted at a specific section of a page. It lets the writer of the document create links to these anchors, which quickly take the reader to the specified section. The table of contents at the top of this document, for example, uses hyperlinks to anchors embedded throughout this document. (Note: Do not include any other search operators with the allinanchor: operator. )
• allintext: Restricts the search to documents whose body text contains the search terms. Search does not search for the query words in the metadata, titles, and anchors.
• allintitle: Restricts the search to documents whose HTML title contains all the search terms.
• allinurl: Restricts the search to documents whose URL contains the search terms. The search operator does not require the query words to be adjacent to each other in the document, nor does it require the words to appear in a particular order in the document. (Note: The search operator works on words in the URL, not URL components such as punctuation. Slashes ("/"), for example, are ignored.)
• filetype: Restricts the search to specific file types such as Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, or Word documents. Type the filetype: operator followed by the file extension. 
• intext: Restricts the search to documents that contain the search word in the body text of the documents.              
• intitle: Restricts the search to documents that contain the search word in the HTML title.